First, a vanilla that is anything but basic, followed by a chocolate, deep and rich, but not overly sweet. The secret, says Friley, is to add melted chocolate straight into the mix instead of cocoa. Then, cardamom, that pod spice that flavours everything from Indian curries to Scandinavian baking.

Each time, Friley anticipates the reaction, smiling broadly as the tasters grin in response, letting out a long mmm with each bite.

“I’ve loved ice cream my whole life; I never imagined I could make a living at it,” says Friley, the owner and ice cream creator behind Village Ice Cream.

The small shop in Victoria Park opened late last month with little fanfare but growing buzz. Even before the doors officially opened, Friley was selling pints out the back door.

The response to his simple, rich and flavourful ice creams is good. And it’s no surprise. He has been careful to craft his ice creams using simple ingredients that speak to recipes of 100 years ago.

But it has taken a village — so to speak — to get the scoop shop up and running. It’s a family affair with brother Sam taking on marketing, parents Kathy and Bill and cousins Nina Palmer and Todd Macfie of Platform Design helping out with branding.

Outside of family ties, Friley has found mentors in two of the city’s well-established food experts: Aviv Fried, the man behind Sidewalk Citizen bakery, and chef Michael Noble, whose restaurant Notable will be selling ice cream sandwiches using Friley’s concoctions.

It’s an about-face for the 28-year-old who originally went to college to study aerospace engineering in Colorado. (He changed majors and schools after realizing it wasn’t the right fit.)

At 25, in the midst of what he calls a “quarter-life crisis,” Friley quit his job working for an entrepreneur and two months later climbed on a motorcycle with a plan to ride to Rio de Janeiro.

Somewhere around southern Mexico, he realized travel wasn’t the answer. At the end of it, he still wouldn’t know what he wanted to do and he’d be broke to boot.

What he did know was he had a love of food that ran along family lines and that he wanted people to enjoy a sensory experience.

“I grew up in a foodie family. At breakfast, we’d talk about what was for dinner. Life was spent in the kitchen,” he says.

It was a night of sulking over a project he knew would never happen and seeking culinary comfort that led Friley to his grandmother’s freezer where he found a huckleberry ice cream made locally in Helena, Mont.

The rich, creamy and dense ice cream — with its local ingredients and flavours — led to the inception of Village Ice Cream.

It took 13 months for Friley to perfect his recipe that uses little more than cream and milk, egg yolks, sugar and flavours like Phil & Sebastian coffee beans and cardamom pods from Inglewood’s Silk Road Spice Merchant.

Through that process, he worked with dairy scientists, people from the Alberta Livestock and Meat Agency and boutique dairies.

His ingredients are local and organic whenever possible.

“This is not your bubble gum scoop shop,” he says.

Instead, there’s the popular salted caramel, the not-achingly-sweet chocolate, a coffee version made from steeping whole beans in cream, and huckleberry — a tribute to the birth of the idea.

Village Ice Cream serves 10 flavours with two seasonal additions that change often to give Friley a chance to get creative. (Just in time for Stampede is Friley’s take on the pancake breakfast: maple ice cream with crumbles of bacon and waffle cone mixed in.) There’s also one or two sorbets for the lactose intolerant.

All can be served up in homemade waffle cones.

Eat them outside of the shop in the “parklet” Friley has created in the space of a parking spot out front with wooden benches and green shrubs, or buy a pint to take home and enjoy.

Prices range from $3 for one scoop to $9 for a triple; that amount will also get you a take-home pint.

And if you can’t make it down to the shop in Victoria Park (431 10th Ave. S.E.), keep an eye out this summer for the Village Cream-cycle, a European tricycle that will have ice cream sandwiches on board.

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